Eyes of Lenses // Edition #1

This week was the start of learning on how the eye of a camera functioned and how we were supposed to use it when lighting scenes or spawning a specific Depth of Focus. That, and this blog post will also roughly cover on how Shutter Speed emotionally affects a scene and how changes in the detail of movement can change at each shutter speed/angle.

Exposure Triangle + Aperture
Starting off with the Exposure Triangle I have to be honest. It was the first time that I had ever seen it and had learned on what it did (trust me, now that i think about it, you really don't learn much in the camera dept during your time in Media Studies classes).

Essentially, by what I understand, the purpose of the Exposure Triangle is to encourage the habit of having the correct exposure in regards to shooting film/taking photographs. The three factors which determains exposure are...

ISO (or the control of Gain // Sensitivity vs. Noise)

Shutter Speed (or how fast the shutter will flicker in a second and affects the motion aspect of video // Motion blur vs. Sharp)

Aperture (or how much light is being allowed into the camera; the eye of the camera // Light (measured in F-stops) OR Deep Focus vs. Shallow Focus)

Extra points from Notes:

Known to be related of a ratio between the area of the hole. This variable controls an amount of light coming in, but shouldn’t be depended on to be the main controller of light (Shutter Speed should), as the Aperture should be used to create the Depth of Field of a shot.

The ratio between aperture + shutter angle should reciprocate. What you give with one, you make up the rest with the other.

The Effects of Shutter Speed(just roughly)

Looking at this example, a fight scene shot with the Canon Rebel T2i (more of a photography camera than one to shoot video with), the use of a high shutter speed/angle of 1/250 OR 36 degrees (guessing) not only highly refines the focus of sudden fast movements of the human subjects, but could inevitably make the audience feel more tense, on the edge of their seat, as action unfolds on screen.

This could be due to a mix of aspects like angling or the situation at hand, but the shutter speed, which looks kinda like one or two frames being deducted (when compared to something shot in a lower shutter speed), in this case has quite a bit to have contributed to this feeling.

Let's say if the entire sequence was shot in a lower shutter angle. What would there be? Well, one thing to point out is the motion of the video. The movement of the actors in the examplar piece above would be shown as blurry, but more of that movement would be involved than before. In some cases, it would ultimately feel like an amateurly shot home video ready to be submitted to MTV's Jackass. The emotionally tense attribution once felt could easily go away.